Comments on: Moving From Server to Server: A Guide to Switching Hosts

By: redwall_hp

redwall_hp — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:42:16 +0000

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll add the link. And enjoy the plugin.

By: Udegbunam Chukwudi

Udegbunam Chukwudi — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:33:35 +0000

I installed your amazing gocode plug-in yesterday and that’s how I found your blog. Nice articles you’ve got here. You might want to consider linking to http://www.webmaster-source.co.....-htaccess/ in step 1 of this post. Good for SEO via internal linking.
I’ll be staying subscribed to your feed for updates.
Cheers.

By: Tanner

Tanner — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 23:09:45 +0000

On last thing make sure your new host has good support and weekend hours. Nothing worse than calling at 3 am to fix somthing small and getting a 5 dollar guy to submit a ticket. When I moved to Server Intellect I had these guys on the phone around 20 times and they answered and fixed everything little issue I had. Support good support!

By: Raman

Raman — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 14:32:53 +0000

nice tips,will definitely look for each and every details provided….thanks

By: Sumesh

Sumesh — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:42:44 +0000

There’s one more thing: ask your original host to setup a TTL (time to live) of 5-15 minutes, wait for a few minutes, and only then switch nameservers. That way, the DNS propogation will be done in less than half an hour. I did this for my last host move.

By: Completed OMNINOGGIN Server Migration | OMNINOGGIN

Completed OMNINOGGIN Server Migration | OMNINOGGIN — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 03:04:40 +0000

[…] (just a bit time-consuming if it’s your first time). Luckily I was able to follow a great checklist for host switching written by Matt Harzewski. I believe that everything should be working, but please let me know (via […]

By: Thaya Kareeson

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:57:05 +0000

@Matt,Thank you for your response. I love how there is a plugin to do just about anything in WordPress. I’m be looking forward to the geek stuff I’ll be doing this weekend.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:40:28 +0000

@John, Yeah, that would work good. I've sort of done that myself before, but it depends on the situation. (Oh, and I've had to migrate some of my custom code from PHP4 to PHP5 before, and it wasn't exactly fun. Took a couple hours to fix and test everything...)

@Thaya, I guess it would make sense to order the hosting first... Putting a site into maintenance mode varies. If you're using WordPress, you can use the useful Maintenance Mode plugin. If you're not using WP, you'll probably have to hack together your own solution. One method I've used before is to create a page with a "Down for Maintenance" message, and edit my pageheader.php template, adding a header("Location: maintenance.php"); to the top. Basically the line redirects all traffic to the site to the maintenance page.

By: Thaya Kareeson

Thaya Kareeson — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:21:53 +0000

Matt,you wrote this just in time. I was planning on changing server providers over this weekend. About your post, I have a couple of questions. 1. Shouldn’t you order your hosting plan before anything? Usually it takes the provider a while to set it up, so you can spend that time preparing the migration. 2. How do you put your site in maintenance mode and notify the readers? 3. Shouldn’t you set your server to maintenance mode just right before the data migration? Aside from those questions, I wanted to mention that I wrote a guide on how to create a staging WordPress site for testing that contains some useful commands (particularly MySQL and rsync) that non-technical people can refer to when doing server migration. (http://omninoggin.com/2008/04/.....r-testing/) Hopefully it will help someone out. In fact, maybe I will post a command-by-command guide when I migrate servers this weekend?

By: John W. Furst

John W. Furst — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:56:25 +0000

Yeah, it’s easy to oversee little details.In some cases you will use the opportunity to upgrade your software at the same time. E.g. newer WordPress release, your new hosting account might use PHP5 instead of PHP4, or probably another database version or software, different security settings, etc.All this will cause additional trouble, especially, if you have customized plugins, templates, settings yourself. Things might not work from scratch as smoothly as you like. I guess people who tuck into code, know what to do anyway.Those non technical people with their Fantastico default settings might not get into those troubles, but an upgrade will break something (usually).I would put the site in maintenance mode later, after an ‘empty’ test installation of the site (blog, gallery, dynamic elements, …) performs well on the technical level.Then grab the content, move it over, do the last tweaks and switch.YoursJohn